2026-10-09 APP 2.0.0-beta48 has been released !
This is mainly a bug fix release for the reported bugs in beta47. In addition it has a significant User Interface performance improvement noticable when you need to process 1000s of images in APP.
2026-10-03 APP 2.0.0-beta47 has been released !
This is a very big release... many code optimizations/rewrites, many parts of APP are much faster and more precise, especially star analysis and registration are much faster ! Big mosaics will go much faster 🙂
And we introduce a new preview filter, which includes the new Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch and a General Levels Stretch, this has been long over due. The old preview filter (the panel on the right side to stretch and preview your data) has not been updated for a couple of years and it is a critical part of any APP session.
Adaptive Deep Sky Stretch or ADSS is a much more intuitive stretch algorithm. It is also color preserving (which is a great new addition in itself ! ) which means that the highlights are no longer bleached, color is maintained from the linear data while stretching. You can simply stretch your data using the sky background level and signal width sliders which work much easier and more intuitive. You no longer need to fiddle with the old complicated sliders with zoom buttons. All the zoom buttons for the sliders are made redundant. And you can enter slider values in the slider value fields yourself. I will make a youtube video in the coming days to explain and fully introduce ADSS. Once the video is ready, it will be highlighted on the forum.
RGB Combine upgrade !. The RGB Combine Tool has been rewritten mostly. The tool is faster and easier to use and most importantly, the Luminance slider to inject a luminance channel or channels into the RGB composite is now working correctly. It no longer bleaches the RGB colors. Combined with the new ADSS preview, you will get much better and easier great composites with great color! I will also explain this in a new youtube video.
I do a lot of tracked milky way wide field panoramas (e.g. 3x3 mosaic with a 50mm or 85mm lens on a full frame camera) which I later combine with separate foreground shots and a lot of the sky shots have some parts of the foreground (horizon line, tree branches, ...) in it as I usually capture the sky from the same position as the foreground.
As all of the panorama stitching software out there I know of (e.g. Hugin, PTGui, ...) have some serious problems in stitching night sky images which are hard to correct manually, especially when it comes to seamless transitions between the frames when removing the stars and stretching the image (hard edges along the seam lines in the starless part or edges of different star shapes etc.) I really like to use APP for that.
APP does a really good job at this, far better than other stitching software, but this seems only to be the case when the field of view is not too big and there are not too much obstacles in the images. With a 85mm 3x3 shot and only some little foreground in the lower row it works really well but e.g. in a 3x3 50mm shot with a lot of tree branches around the result I get from APP is not useable at all.
What I wish I could do here is apply some masking on the source images to tell APP that there is no sky in the appropriate parts which really could the result here.
What also could be nice is to have some options for the panoramic image projection (rectlinear, which seems to be used in APP, or alternatively mercator, spheric, cylindric, etc.).
I know that APP is mainly designed for deep sky imaging, but finding good stitching software for wide field is really hard and APP seems to have really good potential here.
Regards,
Dominik
Trees and such can cause an issue indeed, we do want to improve on this and is on our to-do list. Not with a very high priority at the moment though.
